Tag: Mid 2009

After getting back from the OTN Nordic Tour 2013, I figured it was time to give OS X Mavericks a go.

I’m currently using a MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2009). It’s a little long in the tooth, but it has 8G RAM and a 256G SSD, so it still performs pretty well. At least well enough for me not to replace it just yet.

The download took about 30 minutes. I guess I’m a little behind the curve here because lots of people complained about the download times. It pays to hold off for a few days. The installation took about the same amount of time too, so after about an hour I had Mavericks up and running.

Several people reported really slow performance after the upgrade. So far it looks pretty much the same to me.

I had already read Jason Arneil‘s article about VirtualBox 4.3 on OS X Mavericks, which saved me a lot of time. I can’t live without VirtualBox, so any OS that can’t run it is out of the Window for me. I had similar issues to those he saw and fixed them in the same way. Thanks Jason!

So now everything is running as normal. If anything scary jumps out I will report…

I’ve had my 13″ MacBook Pro since the mid 2009 refresh and it’s been really reliable. Apart from one brief visit to Apple to replace a noisy fan, I’ve had no worries. A few years ago I upgraded from 4G to 8G RAM, so I’m not stranger to taking the back off it.

Even though it’s quite old by computer geek standards, I really don’t have any performance problems. I do demos with a couple of Linux VMs running Oracle and it works OK. Despite this, I was bored the other night and decided to buy an SSD to replace the internal hard drive. It arrived yesterday, so during last nights insomnia, I decided to fit the hard drive, rather than stare at the ceiling.

The actual hard drive replacement is pretty simple. You can see an example of it here. It takes about 5 minutes.

The transfer of the data proved a little more tricky than I expected though…

Attempt 1:

I use Time Machine for backups, so I slapped in the new hard drive, booted from the CD and expected to just restore from Time Machine. It turns out my Time Machine backups weren’t as complete as I thought.

Attempt 2:

No worries. I connected my old hard drive using a USB cable, booted from the CD and used the Disk Utility to restore the old hard drive to the new SSD. That would have been fine, except the new hard drive was fractionally smaller than the old one. That would have been fine for a Time Machine backup, since the old drive was not completely full, but for an image restore it’s a big no-no. Now I was starting to get worried. I could always replace the old drive, but I was starting to think I might have wasted my money.

Attempt 3:

So finally I bit the bullet and re-installed Snow Leopard (the most recent media I had), upgraded to Lion, then Mountain Lion through the App Store. Once that was done I dragged my apps and data from the old drive across to the new drive. Job’s a good’un!

So it got solved in the end, but it wasn’t quite the blissful experience I expected.